THE FUTURE SAINTS

Can this rock band be saved?

Winstead’s latest is an enemies-to-lovers romance set in the richly evoked world of the music business, featuring dual points of view: Theo Ford, the suit sent by the record company to deal with their problematic indie rock group, the Future Saints; and Hannah Cortland, the troubled lead singer of the band, reeling since the drowning death of her younger sister, Ginny, who was also the band’s manager. With “dark brown hair sweeping across high cheekbones, long-lashed hazel eyes, thick eyebrows, and lips too full to be anything but objectively beautiful,” Theo doesn’t look, or act, much like a corporate goon. “Are label reps legally allowed to be this hot?” asks Ginny. Wait, Ginny’s talking? She’s the dead one, right? Whether she is an actual ghost that only Hannah can see and hear or a phase in Hannah’s grief process is not clear, at least at first. What is clear is that Hannah, a gorgeous California blond with abundant songwriting and singing talent, is in big trouble, drinking herself into oblivion and falling off concert stages, and Theo is also falling—for her. He commits to pulling the band back from the edge and getting it into the studio to fulfill its contract for another album, with Hannah’s tidal-force grief as the creative impetus behind a reinvented sound. The narrative sections are punctuated with excerpts of reviews and features about the band (Winstead has fun ventriloquizing the music writing found in venues including Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and the New York Times), as well as podcast and interview transcripts and social media posts. The romance aspect checks all the boxes, and the music industry setting is done more vividly and believably than in similar novels. The grief plot is the weakest link, sometimes more cheesy than truly moving.

A solid entry in the ever-more-popular category of music-biz lit, pulled off with notable élan.